What the heck is a gaspergou? Explaining some of the more mysterious fishes found in Texas' waters

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"Texas Parks and Wildlife Department information specialist Larry Hodge was fishing at Lake Texoma when he hooked this gaspergou, more formally known as freshwater drum. The fish fought so hard that Hodge was certain he had hooked a 13-pound largemouth bass.

A recent column about the primordial bowfin elicited interesting responses from readers. One, in particular, posed questions about mysterious fish he heard about as a kid in East Texas. Included on his list were paddlefish, gaspergou, drum and buffalo. “What the heck is a gaspergou?” he wrote in an e-mail. That’s a valid question.

Gaspergou or simply gou (pronounced goo), are southern monikers for freshwater drum. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department district biologist Bruce Hysmith at Denison is the senior biologist on the TPWD staff.

Hysmith believes gaspergou is a Cajun name. A Louisiana fish called “cazeburgot” was described in French history books as early as 1753, and the fish’s name was written as Le Casse-burgo by a different author in 1758.

“It’s pure Cajun/French,” agrees Todd Driscoll, a TPWD biologist whose district includes Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend lakes. “It’s like calling a bowfin a choupique or calling a crappie a sac-a-lait.”

In Driscoll’s district, choupique is pronounced “shoe pick” and sac-a-lait translates to sack of milk, no doubt because crappie are great fish to eat.

Nicknames for fish vary with regions. In its northern range, the freshwater drum is often called a sheepshead. Members of the drum family are called drum because of the drumming or grunting sounds they make.

They eat a variety of foods, including insect larvae, crustaceans and even small mollusks. They can be caught on a variety of natural baits as well as lures and flies. Like many other nongame species, they are often derided as “rough fish.” At the end of a fishing line, they are rough customers.

Paddlefish are unusual filter feeders that swim with their mouths agape, using gill rakers to separate plankton from the water column. Sometimes called a spoonbill or a spoonbill catfish, paddlefish have been a protected species in Texas since 1977, and efforts have just begun to restore paddlefish to Caddo Lake. They were literally here before the dinosaurs.

Paddlefish eggs are marketed similar to caviar, but the fish’s rarity in Texas has more to do with the lack of flowing streams they need for spawning than for their market value. Oklahoma’s state-record paddlefish weighed 125 pounds.

The same reader asked about “government bass” that he’d heard about as a child. According to Hysmith, the term “government bass” stems from a policy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and many state game and fish departments of stocking fish in any waters, including private lakes.

“Government bass” went away in Texas about 1975, said Hysmith, because TPWD’s hatcheries could barely meet the stocking demands of big public lakes. A private hatchery industry arose to take care of private waters.

“There was even a government name attached to blue catfish,” said Hysmith. “They were called high-finned government blues.”

Buffalo resemble common carp and, though they lack that fish’s barbels (fleshy filaments like catfish whiskers), they are often mistaken for carp. They are classed as “suckers” because their mouths are oriented downward. There are three species of buffalo in Texas with black buffalo being the smallest and least common.

The others are bigmouth buffalo and smallmouth buffalo. Buffalo are the primary targets of commercial fishermen.

While some anglers turn up their noses at these rough fish species, others cherish them for the angling challenge they present. Alligator gar, the true giants of Texas inland waters, are the state’s only freshwater nongame fish with a daily bag limit, one fish.